Topic: affordances

Matthieu de Wit, Luis Favela and Vicente Raja examine how neuroscience can use ecological psychology without losing its theoretical commitments. Topics include perception and action, organism–environment relations, affordances, dynamics and the challenges of explaining naturalistic neural data within a field dominated by computational and mechanistic approaches.

Vicente Raja examines how ecological psychology can inform neuroscience. The discussion connects affordances, direct perception, information and resonance with embodied approaches to brains and minds, then considers plant behaviour. He also explores how shared conceptual motifs can support research across disciplines without requiring identical definitions.

Human cognitive abilities seem qualitatively different from the cognitive abilities of other primates, a difference Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli (2008) attribute to role-based relational reasoning—inferences and generalizations based on the relational roles to which objects (and other relations) are bound, rather than just the features of the objects themselves. Role-based relational reasoning depends on the ability to dynamically bind arguments to relational roles. But dynamic binding cannot be sufficient for relational thinking: Some non-human animals solve the dynamic binding problem, at le